After one year of prototyping I am glad to announce to you 'Industruino'. It is a fully enclosed DIN-rail mountable Arduino compatible board + onboard LCD screen + membrane button panel + prototyping area. Me and my wife Ainura created Industruino for situations where you want to take your Arduino based project from the breadboard to a finished installation. Please have a look at our website for more information: www.industruino.com

We would be grateful to hear what the Arduino community thinks of it. Any constructive feedback/suggestions are welcomed.

I like it and can defiantly see a use for it. The only thing i'd like to see is 6 buttons perhaps instead of three and maybe a couple of little led's some were under the screen a green one and a red one for power indicators or such like. Maybe colour one of the buttons red and another green as well.

@EVP & Chagrin: Thank you very much for the kind words! Nice to hear that you like it!

@EVP: Good point on the red power LED. I will look at implementing this in next version. With more LED's I have to watch out not to occupy too many I/O pins. Maybe I could add a few extra generic LED on the front panel which could be disconnected from I/O using jumpers. D13, which on official Arduino boards has an LED usually used for simple Blink test projects, is connected to my LCD backlight LED's on Industruino. This way it has double function, also quite cool when it is running the bootloader (PWM flashing the backlight ).Concerning extra buttons on the membrane panel: We can easily make custom membrane panels with extra buttons, as all buttons are read on a single analog pin. For very specific applications or customised product we can produce custom panels. The idea was to keep the design neutral and simple so to fit as many applications as possible. For this standard version we chose a three button layout, mainly for ergonomic reasons. The menus can quite easily be navigated using this setup, and values changed. We are thinking in the future to make an Industruino version without lcd screen and more I/O. This version could have a more extended membrane panel as there would be more space on the front face of the enclosure.

I'd personally go with a dual red/green LED - that way you could potentially have three colors available with only a couple pins. Also, a small piezo buzzer/speaker would be helpful (put it on a pin for the Tone library). On both of these options, the ability to disable (via jumpers or switches) them (to free up pins as needed) would be nice, too.

I will not respond to Arduino help PM's from random forum users; if you have such a question, start a new topic thread.

I would be interested to hear from people what they would like to see developed as baseboards for Industruino (the equivalent of shields with standard Arduino).Standard Industruino comes with an empty prototyping baseboard which allows anyone to add their own circuits, but for certain applications we intend to develop custom baseboards.

As a first board we are planning to develop a 4-20ma I/O + PT100 board, to facilitate the connection to off the shelve industrial sensors and actuators.The second item on our list is an ethernet board, but we are debating whether maybe this should be integrated in the main controller board instead (top board) as a different model altogether. Other ideas that came to mind were: 1. RFID + relay board 2. fibre-optic connection board (for long distance comms, or opto-isolated triggering of HV systems) 3. RS485/DMX board.

So please, any suggestions for baseboards would be appreciated and considered for development.

@K7-3D: Thanks for the tip on the PCF8574! I2C expanders will definitely play an important role in feature add-ons for Industruino. I can imagine that a DIN-rail extension board with say 8 relays, all driven by the Industruino's I2C bus could be very useful.

In its current incarnation Industruino can already house all the options that you mention (v-reg, rs485, ethernet) on the empty prototyping base board. I'm looking now on how to integrate Ethernet as option on the base board without sacrificing too much space of prototyping area.

If you're working with 24V DC please have a look at this: http://www.mornsun-power.com/cn/product_inf.aspx?typeID=62#They have the same pinout as 7805 regulators but are switching instead of linear type. So when working with >12V they are really useful because they are much more efficient and thus don't generate much heat, don't need a bulky heat-sink, and save power. I'm planning to offer them as an option on future versions of Industruino. I've used their isolated versions before and I am very happy about them. If you don't want a Chinese brand you can get the same types from XP-power.

I recentely played with a PCF8574 and the PCF8574 can act as a sink for 10mA but as a source it can provide less current, 0.1mA.

When I connected the GND side of the LED to the PCF8574 and the other side on +5V the LED works as expected.When I connected the +5V side of the LED to the PCF8574 and the other side to GND the LED fail to light up brightly.

Reading back the status of a line also failed but I don't recall in which of the 2 scenario's.

I got an idea that you can use an angled 5-pole female HDR connector on the controller and a male connector on the expansion modules as and in the accordance followed a female connector on the other side of the expansion module so you can just link them together

After two months of working on improving Industruino I am pleased to announce that we have finally released the next version (beta3) of Industruino which incorporates all the suggestions from our early beta testers. Please have a look at www.industruino.com for new pictures and more information.

We will now have more time to work on Industruino Ethernet, which will be implemented on a baseboard using the Wiznet W5200 chip. The idea is to have a baseboard which can be swapped into an existing Industruino to add Ethernet functionality (same principle as shields really...). We see the urgency of Ethernet functionality so we will push to release asap. I expect early beta samples in a months time.